This article examines the meanings of the crime scene in serial killings, and the tensions between the real and the imagined in the circulation of those meanings. Starting with the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 it argues that they, as well as forming an origin for the construction of the identity of ‘the serial killer’, initiate certain ideas about the relationship of subjects to spaces and the existence of the self in the modern urban landscape. It suggests that these ideas come to play an integral part in the contemporary discourse of serial killing, both in the popular imagination and in professional analysis. Examining the Whitechapel Murders, more recent cases and modern profiling techniques, it argues that popular and professional representations of crime scenes reveal more of social anxieties about the nature of the public and the private than they do about serial killers. It suggests that ‘the serial killer’ is not a coherent type, but an invention produced from the confusions of persons and places.
The term “imperial Gothic” is first explored by Patrick Brantlinger in his
Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914
, published in 1988. He suggests that the span of the genre might be from Henry Rider Haggard's
King Solomon's Mines
(1885) to at least John Buchan's
Greenmantle
(1916), and that it is marked by a combination of Darwinism, imperialism, and an interest in the occult. In unpacking the idea, he indicates the functions of both imperialism and occultism as partial substitutes for declining religious faith, and asserts that it is also possible to distinguish clear concerns about questions of civilization and progress that make imperial Gothic specific to the culture of late‐Victorian and early‐Edwardian Britain. Brantlinger identifies the three principal themes of imperial Gothic as an individual regression, or what was called “going native;” an invasion of civilization by the forces of barbarism or demonism; and the diminution of opportunities for adventure and heroism in the modern world. Subsequent critical works on the Gothic and the fin de siècle have largely confirmed Brantlinger's assertion that there is an identifiable knot of issues in late‐nineteenth century and prewar fiction, the representations of which can be read in relation to the production of an imperialist national identity (see
fin‐de‐siècle gothic
).
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